


when the flood is gone (we still remain)

by Unforgotten



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Goats, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22796545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: Thor and Bucky after the Snap.And also, there's a goat.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Thor
Comments: 20
Kudos: 71
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	when the flood is gone (we still remain)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



The thing about New Asgard was that it smelled like fish all the time. It reminded Bucky of Fridays, back when he'd been a kid. He still wasn't sure what to do with that, so whenever being reminded started to make him feel uneasy, he went to find something to do. Sometimes this meant helping someone repair a boat or other equipment. Other times, it meant helping clean fish after fish after fish, knowing that no matter how big the catch was, it wasn't going to feed all these space god people for more than an hour or two.

Still other times, it meant being the one to check up on the king. It was something someone needed to do, but no one else wanted to do. Bucky didn't mind, though. Going to that dark little house reminded him of a much different place in his life than Fridays when he was a kid--a place that was somehow a lot less likely to make him uneasy than those older memories were. He'd needed a place to hide, not that long ago. Maybe Thor did, too. That was why Bucky always made sure to knock on the door, instead of just barging in.

"Hey," he called, on one particular day, long enough after that the new normal had started to almost feel like the way things were going to be from now on-like something they could all live with, instead of something that was never going to feel anything other than surreal. "Can we come in?"

"You may as well," came the answer.

Inside, Bucky found Thor on the couch, exactly where he'd been all the others times--except that, like all the other times, there were a few more pile of beer cans to step over than there had been the last time.

Normally, Thor would have invited Bucky to sit with him, and have a beer. He'd have wanted to talk about his brother, who Bucky had never met, or Old Asgard, which he'd never been to, or maybe even Steve, who Bucky wasn't ready to talk about with anyone, and probably never would be. 

This time, though, he squinted, and said, "Is that a goat you have with you?"

"I did say 'we,'" Bucky said. To the goat, who was eying the beer cans in a way that meant she definitely wanted to be chewing up beer cans, he added, "No. Leave those alone."

"I thought you meant Val was with you."

Bucky was pretty sure she'd washed her hands of the whole thing. It was hard to blame her, considering how much she had to keep track of that wasn't whether or not Thor was ever going to get around to keeping track of all of it instead. But there was no way Bucky was going to say any of that. A lot safer to stick with the goat. "The Wakandans brought her over for me this morning." And everything from inside his hut, not that it amounted to much. Two whole boxes, which he'd shoved in the back of a closet and would get around to opening approximately never. "I didn't actually know they were coming. So I don't have a pen or anything set up for her yet. Anyway, hope you don't mind."

"No, not at all," Thor said, the kind of easy proclamation that Bucky thought might have been the way he'd sounded most of the time, before. "Come, sit. Have a beer. There's plenty."

Bucky sat, and took a beer, and braced himself for the reminiscing. 

"Tell me something," Thor said.

Not how they usually got started, but: "Sure."

"How many goats did you have before?"

"Uh. Five."

"And the rest are gone?"

Bucky had asked the exact same thing this morning. Now, he really wished he hadn't. "Yeah."

Thor was bending down now, looking at the goat, which made it hard to see his face. But it wasn't hard to hear the anger and grief in his voice when reached his hand out and said, "My apologies, sir goat."

"It's a girl goat," Bucky said, mostly because he couldn't come up with anything better to say.

"My apologies, lady goat," Thor said. "For both of my grievances."

The goat, who'd been thinking about chewing the carpet, looked up and came over. She's always been easy for being scratched on her jaw. Maybe Thor had been around goats before, because Bucky didn't even have to tell him.

"I'm going to get her set up at my place later," he said. "You can come help, if you want."

Thor was quiet for a moment, scratching the side of the goat's neck. "Perhaps." He glanced out the window, where people were working down the street, occasionally shouting things you couldn't make up from over here even with the TV off. "Perhaps not."

"We could go the back way," Bucky said, pushing, and not knowing why this was the time and place he'd decided it was better to push than to go along. He'd get it later, when he thought about the difference between sleeping on a mattress on the floor in his old apartment, and sleeping on a mat on the floor in his hut in Wakanda. On the face of it, they didn't sound that different...but one place was where he'd gone to stop the bleeding, while the other was where he'd finally started to heal. For now, though, he went with it, letting instinct guide the way. "No one would see us."

While Thor was thinking, he had stopped petting the goat, who took exception to this by butting his knee.

"All right," Thor said. It wasn't clear whether he meant all right, he would come, or all right, he would pet the goat some more. But a few seconds later, he was saying, "You're a good goat, aren't you? Yes, you are," and Bucky figured maybe there was another option.

"You know," he said, "we could set her pen up here if you want. You have more room than I do."

He knew it was the right thing to say right away. There was something about taking care of more than just himself that had helped him in Wakanda. That had helped him more than anything except Shuri getting those words out of his head, maybe. Maybe it would help Thor, too. Either way, Bucky would have to come over here every day for a while, just to make sure things were going okay. He'd have had to make time to take care of the goat either way, so it wasn't like it made much difference to him.

"A most noble offer," Thor said, shifting from baby-talking the goat to sounding pretty close to the king he was supposed to be. "I accept."

*

So they set up a nice big goat pen with a nice big goat shed behind Thor's house. Bucky went over there every day to check on both of them, even once it was clear that Thor was doing just fine as a goat caretaker. Slowly, Thor seemed to be coming out of whatever funk he'd been in. One day, Bucky came over to find that the piles of beer cans actually looked smaller. One day about six months after that, they were gone altogether. Somewhere in the middle, Thor started showering, and trimmed his beard, and remembered how to run a comb through his hair. He cleaned up good. So good that sometimes, when he was laughing at something Bucky had said, or animatedly telling a story about some stupid shit he and his brother had done back on Old Asgard, Bucky would find his mind wandering to places it hadn't gone in about eighty-five years, and probably shouldn't be going now, either.

Around the time the beer cans disappeared, Thor started helping with all the things Bucky helped with. Repairing nets and boats, cleaning fish. He did whatever work was asked of him with a smile, and everyone else started talking about how he was going to start being a king again, someday soon.

Bucky, though, wasn't so sure. Too many of Thor's stories included sentences like, "Of course, I still wished to be king someday, then." But even he never could have predicted what came out of Thor's mouth, when he knocked on Bucky's front door one morning, a gigantic ax strapped to his back, and the goat trailing behind him on a lead:

"I'm leaving Earth."

"You--what?"

"There's a mission," Thor said. "Out in space. I've been to space, you know. Many times."

Slowly, Bucky said, "O...kay. What kind of mission?"

"For the Avengers," Thor said. "I called Natasha, just to see what she was up to, you know. She happened to mention it, and now--well, now I'm going. My ship will be here in half an hour or so."

"Your ship," Bucky repeated, still trying to wrap his mind around this. He'd known something was going to change, and change soon, but he hadn't thought it would involve Thor leaving. He wasn't sure what he was even supposed to do here, if Thor was gone. He was the one who'd invited Bucky here, after all, when the people who'd invited him to come to Wakanda had disappeared with half of everyone else. And he wasn't blind, either; he noticed how none of the other Asgardians seemed to know what to make of him, no matter how often they accepted his help.

Maybe all of this showed on his face, because the next thing Thor said was, "I came to tell you you should come with me. We would make a glorious team."

"I'm...not an Avenger." That was one career move that had never been on the table. Not before Steve had gone, and definitely not after. If Thor hadn't taken pity on him all those months ago, there was no telling where he'd be right now.

"No mission truly requires more than one," Thor said blithely. Then, soft and earnest: "Please come. I do not desire to be without you. Not even if the mission is very short. And there is the possibility, of course, that it will be very long. Or if it's not, it could be immediately followed by another, which would be longer."

"I'll think about it. How long did you say I have to decide?"

Half an hour. That was when he'd said his ship would be here. But he hadn't said for sure that was when he had to leave.

"I should leave as soon as possible," Thor said. "The situation is urgent. Time is of the essence."

"People are dying," Bucky guessed, from the graveness of Thor's voice.

"Yes," Thor said. "This is of my doing, at least in part, and I--I must go. I _will_ go. Perhaps you would have me stay here, take my place as king, but the rest of the Asgardians--my people will be fine. These others won't be."

"Okay," Bucky said, knowing a justifying speech when he heard one, and not really needing to hear all of this one to get what Thor was saying (especially when it wasn't really Bucky he was saying it to, so much as everyone else). "You don't have to be the king if you don't want to."

"No," Thor said. "I suppose I don't."

They stood there for a second, just as awkward as they'd been the first few times Bucky had gone to Thor's house, just as awkward as they hadn't been since he'd brought the goat over. As for the goat herself, she was looking around for something to chew on. If no one distracted her, it was probably going to be the seat of Thor's pants again.

"If there's nothing I can say to convince you," said Thor, which was an interesting assumption given that Bucky hadn't said 'yes' or 'no' or even 'maybe' yet, "then at least allow me to say a proper goodbye."

There had been a few times lately that Bucky had thought Thor might be looking at him like...something. He'd always decided he was imagining it. Thor was ridiculously handsome. Ridiculously handsome people tended to make you think they were giving off come hither vibes when they were doing anything but. Laughing was just laughing. Smiling was just smiling. None of it had to mean anything more than that he was happy right then, not even if he laughed harder and smiled more widely with Bucky than Bucky ever saw him doing with anyone else. Besides, even if people from outer space or even from this century were more open about this kind of thing now than Bucky had ever imagined anyone being back in his day, it was always possible the signals had changed in the meantime. Maybe there was a language he didn't know, signs he couldn't read, because even though he'd been alive when they developed, it wasn't like he'd been around.

But now Thor kissed him, and Bucky realized he'd been right. And also, Thor's lips were really soft, and really warm. And then he was backing away from Bucky, looking pleased, and bashful, and a little worried. Bucky had to hand it to him, because if he'd been the one who'd made the first move, he'd have been a whole lot more worried than that.

"Was that supposed to be your goodbye?" Bucky asked, buoyed by a confidence that seemed a little like it belonged to him, but a lot more like it belonged to some half-remembered stranger from a long time ago--the same stranger who was telling him that he'd never wanted anything more than to go to space, and that there wasn't a chance he was staying here when he could go Up There. "I dunno, I think you're going to have to do better than that if you really want me to go with you."

"Oh, I can do _so_ much better," Thor boasted, pretty much the exact same way he'd boasted that he could clean twice as many fish in twenty minutes than anyone else. It had sort of worked for Bucky then, despite all the usual blood and guts and fingers so frozen they may as well have been on his other hand; it really, really worked for him now.

*

"I have a question," Bucky said. He'd had a lot of them, actually, starting with, 'Tell me what everything on the control panel does.' But with all the ones about the ship, and space, and what kind of enormous bloodthirsty monsters Thor was supposed to use his big ax on out of the way, it was time for more mundane things, like, "Why did we bring the goat to space?"

In answer, Thor kissed him absently. (He had turned out to be very affectionate; they'd had sex a couple times before the ship got there, and a couple more times since, with lots of kissing in-between.) Then he said, "She was given to me by someone I hold in very great esteem. Of course I had to bring her."

"Oh," Bucky said.

"Besides, if we have the time after this mission, I'd like to see if we can find a mate for her."

"--A what now?"

"Livestock from Earth is very rare out in space. Very valuable."

Bucky had the feeling he was going to regret asking, but: "And, uh, why is that?"

"There's this creature they cross well with. A goat-like thing, with six legs and green fur. They're endangered, you know. I can't remember what they're called right now. But Earth goat hybrids are very hardy, so her foals would be incredibly valuable. Worth their weight in fuel."

"Kids," Bucky said.

"Don't want them. I hope that's not a--what do you call it--"

"Dealbreaker," Bucky said. "Which it isn't. And I just meant baby goats are called kids. Not foals."

"Ah, of course. Her kids would be incredibly valuable." That sounded like a great way to paint a target on their back to Bucky, but before he could say so, Thor looked at the screen and said, "There's the jump-point now."

Space goats forgotten for the moment, Bucky looked, too. He didn't even have to ask Thor to explain for Thor to start explaining anyway. As he did, they got closer to the jump-point, and then closer still. Beyond it was a planet with a village being overrun by some sort of monster. Beyond that was who knew what else. The future, and whatever was waiting for them there.

It wasn't bright, exactly. Not after everything that had happened. But it was close enough, at least for now.

**Author's Note:**

> When I started this, I vaguely thought Loki would probably come back at some point during the story. Alas, he didn't show up to steal the show, but please rest assured that he's out there somewhere, doing something he shouldn't be. ;)


End file.
